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King Crimson Album Art: In the Wake of Poseidon

The most com­mon cri­tique levied against King Crimson’s In the Wake of Posei­don is that it is a mere retread of ground already bro­ken by their leg­endary debut album In the Court of the Crim­son King. This “more of the same” charge applies to the entire pack­age; the com­po­si­tion, instru­men­ta­tion, musi­cal styles, and nomen­cla­ture all fit the gen­eral tem­plate of its pre­de­ces­sor, and the album art con­tin­ued the motif of fan­tas­ti­cal portraiture.

I hadn’t been look­ing for­ward to writ­ing this chap­ter in my visual his­tory of King Crim­son. Musi­cally speak­ing, In the Wake of Posei­don is not my least favorite King Crim­son album (for the record: Lizard, fol­lowed hotly by Earth­bound), but it is the one about which I have the most dif­fi­culty try­ing to find some­thing inter­est­ing to say. This may sound like heresy, but I don’t love In the Court of the Crim­son King either, but I value and appre­ci­ate it from a his­toric point of view. So it’s very dif­fi­cult for me to work up enthu­si­asm to lis­ten to or write about an album that sounds to me like a do-over. Coin­ci­den­tally or not, the 2010 40th Anniver­sary Edi­tion reis­sue is one of the few in the ongo­ing series not to fea­ture a liner note essay by Robert Fripp, so per­haps he didn’t know what to say either.

Per­haps the super­fi­cial sim­i­lar­ity to their first album may be excused. Look­ing back from the per­spec­tive of 2012, King Crim­son is rightly praised for rarely repeat­ing itself. The few occa­sions when they did, such as In the Wake of Posei­don, now stand out in stark relief to their usual modus operandi of con­stant rein­ven­tion. For instance, I brought along a neo­phyte to a 1995 live show in Philadel­phia, and she was puz­zled by the sur­face sim­i­lar­i­ties between “Red,” “VROOOM,” and “VROOOMVROOOM”, which to her sounded like the same song three times (to be fair, the lat­ter actu­ally is a ver­sion of “VROOOM”, albeit upside-down and back­wards, and includes a bit orig­i­nally compsed for “Red”, but the point stands). Unfor­tu­nately, among the rare occa­sions when the band chose to pave the cow­paths was the crit­i­cal junc­ture between their debut and follow-up.

King Crim­son was not a band that slowly found an iden­tity and an audi­ence through exten­sive tour­ing and the oppor­tu­nity of a few albums to exper­i­ment while not under too harsh a spot­light, at least at first (a lux­ury enjoyed, arguably, by peers such as Gen­e­sis and Yes). Rather, they seem­ingly exploded out of nowhere in 1969, appear­ing fully formed, con­fi­dently pol­ished and dra­matic both live and in the stu­dio. Then they broke up.

With the found­ing lineup already dis­in­te­grat­ing by 1970, Robert Fripp found him­self “now in sole com­mand of Crimson’s musi­cal direc­tion” (Sid Smith, liner notes to 40th Anniver­sary Edi­tion) along with Sin­field. In what must have been a pro­foundly awk­ward arrange­ment, orig­i­nal mem­bers Greg Lake, Michael Giles, and Peter Giles returned as con­tracted ses­sion musi­cians in an attempt to keep the band alive while pre­serv­ing some styl­is­tic con­ti­nu­ity. The impos­si­ble task at hand: com­pos­ing and record­ing the prover­bial dif­fi­cult sopho­more effort to fol­low up on the sig­nif­i­cant crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess of their debut.

The inner gate­fold to King Crimson’s In the Wake of Posei­don — paint­ing by Peter Sinfield

Fripp, Sin­field & Co. wound up largely repeat­ing them­selves, much as a typ­i­cal sequel to a pop­corn sum­mer film is a ghostly echo of the orig­i­nal. Even the ver­bose album title is mod­eled on the wordy orig­i­nal. To fur­ther illus­trate my point, look at the first sides of each album: “Pic­tures of a City” sounds like a slightly rewrit­ten ver­sion of “21st Cen­tury Schizoid Man”. Then, “Cadence and Cas­cade” fills the spot for­merly taken by “I Talk to the Wind” — a bal­lad to cleanse the aural palate before the mel­lotron gloom & doom that close each first side: “Epi­taph” and “In the Wake of Poseidon”.

The struc­tural and tonal echoes were not just musi­cal. In the Court of the Crim­son King famously fea­tured two por­traits of human faces, the outer sleeve com­monly iden­ti­fied as the Schizoid Man and the inner gate­fold fea­tured a jovial Crim­son King. The In the Wake of Posei­don sleeve cemented this idea into a tra­di­tion: illus­tra­tive depic­tions of char­ac­ters men­tioned in the songs. In a case of over egging the pud­ding, the num­ber of char­ac­ters was mul­ti­plied by six.

In the Wake of Posei­don was orig­i­nally issued on LP for­mat in May 1970, in a lav­ish gate­fold sleeve. Eric Tamm found the art­work inter­est­ing enough to com­ment at length in his book Robert Fripp: From King Crim­son to Gui­tar Craft:

“Poseidon’s expan­sive, fold-out cover fea­tured a paint­ing by Tammo de Jongh called ’12 Arche­types’ – trick­ster, anima, child, magi­cian, and so on – and was per­haps an indi­ca­tion of an inter­est on Fripp’s part in Jun­gian psy­chol­ogy (Carl Jung, like Fripp, was con­cerned with forg­ing some fusion of magic and rea­son, intu­ition and intel­lect, inner and outer, art and sci­ence). As on the jacket of In the Court of the Crim­son King, [Peter] Sinfield’s lyrics were printed in their entirety, though (at least on my copy) the sil­ver ink and semi-glossy back­ground made them oner­ously dif­fi­cult to read.“– Eric Tamm, Robert Fripp: From King Crim­son to Gui­tar Craft, page 48

Eric Tamm’s largely aca­d­e­mic tome on Fripp’s music and phi­los­o­phy rather unsur­pris­ingly attrib­utes the cover con­cept to Fripp. I haven’t found solid con­fir­ma­tion, but it was more likely Sin­field was the insti­ga­tor here, if not pri­mar­ily respon­si­ble. Sin­field was the dom­i­nant lyri­cist, live light­ing designer, and over­all direc­tor of the band’s visual mate­ri­als through 1972, and would still have been very much in charge of this area at the time. The bevy of clas­si­cal west­ern allu­sions in the lyrics, pri­mar­ily to the Greek God Posei­don and the Roman god Mars, sig­nal this album is def­i­nitely a Sin­field joint. He also per­son­ally con­tributed a tex­tural water­color paint­ing of his own for the inner gatefold.

An image from the book The Magic Cir­cle by Tammo de Jongh

Jung pur­sued many avenues of study, rang­ing from the intel­lec­tual to the super­nat­ural. He is per­haps most famous as the founder of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­ogy and, rel­e­vant to the dis­cus­sion at hand, the con­cept of arche­types. He under­stood them to be an infi­nite set of fig­ures or sym­bols that exist in our col­lec­tive uncon­scious, apart from either the ani­mal instincts that drive human behav­ior or what infants learn through edu­ca­tion and socialization.

Jung did not define a core set of these arche­types, but Richard Gard­ner delin­eated a “mag­i­cal cir­cle of the mind” char­ac­ter­ized by twelve arche­types in his 1969 book The Pur­pose of Love. Artist Tammo de Jongh col­lab­o­rated on Gardner’s sys­tem, and cre­ated a series of twelve sep­a­rate paint­ings com­pris­ing The 12 Faces of Humankind. Each self-contained paint­ing is signed and dated 1967.

Tammo de Jongh’s The 12 Faces of Humankind, a series of paint­ings cre­ated for Richard Gardner’s 1969 book The Pur­pose of Love

Tammo de Jongh fur­ther cod­i­fied this sys­tem of twelve arche­types into his own book The Magic Cir­cle, pub­lished in 1974. But before that, The 12 Faces of Humankind were revisted and revised into a sin­gle paint­ing for King Crimson’s In the Wake of Poseidon.

I have not been able to find doc­u­men­ta­tion regard­ing how these twelve indi­vid­ual paint­ings were com­piled and adapted into a sin­gle paint­ing, or indeed if de Jongh did it him­self. As astute com­menter Rick Roys­ton has pointed out, rough seams are still evi­dent around many of the fig­ures, par­tic­u­larly vis­i­ble around The Old Woman and The Child.

Tammo de Jongh’s paint­ing “Old Woman” from “The 12 Faces of Humankind”, along­side a detail from “The 12 Arche­types” paint­ing used for King Crimson’s In the Wake of Poseidon

“12 Arche­types” depicts The 12 Faces of Humankind orga­nized into two sets of six, the first sub­set arranged around a lunar sym­bol, with the oth­ers illu­mi­nated by a solar icon on the back cover. The visual trope of celes­tial dual­ity appears often through­out the King Crim­son discog­ra­phy, par­tic­u­larly on Larks’ Tongues in Aspic and Three of a Per­fect Pair, not to men­tion the more abstract space imagery that fig­ures into The Con­struKc­tion of Light and Islands.

Two details from Tammo de Jongh’s paint­ing “The 12 Arche­types”, one of many exam­ples of the lunar and solar dual­ity theme in King Crim­son album covers

Arche­types appear­ing on the lunar front cover (clock­wise from top left):

Young girl with key pen­dant: The Child. Green iden­ti­fies her as The Vir­gin, one of three God­dess arche­types in the paint­ing. The num­ber three is more than mys­ti­cal numerol­ogy: some of Fripp’s musi­cal com­po­si­tions for the album were built upon tri­tones, known col­lo­qui­ally as the Devil’s Inter­val or the Devil’s Triad. The lat­ter is is punned upon for the song title “The Devil’s Tri­an­gle”, and inci­den­tally, the god Tri­ton is the son of Posei­don. If only she had been wear­ing a cross pen­dant… I could have made all sorts of inter­est­ing con­nec­tions with Fripp’s choice of jew­elry for his por­trait on the Red sleeve!

Laugh­ing man with beard & gar­lands: The Fool. Green iden­ti­fies the Fool and Actress arche­types as an exam­ple of a male/female dichotomy expressed in the songs them­selves: with “Cadence and Cas­cade” pro­vid­ing a fem­i­nine view­point after the chaotic male aggres­sion of the open­ing track “Pic­tures of a City”. To my eyes, how­ever, it would appear that the artist more delib­er­ately paired The Actress with The Fool.

Woman with blue face and lunar emblem: The Actress. Green iden­ti­fies this arche­type as the Earth Mother, who more likely actu­ally appears on the lower left of the back cover. The cres­cent moon icon is pos­si­bly related to the tantric sym­bols that appear on the Larks’ Tongues in Aspic and Three of a Per­fect Pair sleeves.

Char­ac­ters appear­ing on the solar back cover (clock­wise from top left):

Bearded man sur­rounded by stars: The Logi­cian (or pos­si­bly The Magi­cian). Inter­est­ingly, this arche­type is painted in a notably dif­fer­ent visual style than the rest, almost Cubist.

Old bearded man: The Patri­arch. Jon Green links this arche­type with Holy Roman Emperor Fred­er­ick II, who would also star in the forth­com­ing album Lizard.

African: The Slave. I won­der if The Slave’s place­ment next to The War­rior is sig­nif­i­cant, as enslave­ment is often hand in hand with oppres­sion and war through­out his­tory. We also see a scene sug­gest­ing slav­ery on the Lizard album cover.

The orig­i­nal LP labels for the UK and US edi­tions of In the Wake of PoseidonKing Crimson’s Cat Food 7″ sin­gle sleeve

In the Wake of Posei­don does devi­ate from the In the Court of the Crim­son King tem­plate in one major way: the inclu­sion of the demented pop odd­ity “Cat Food”. The atyp­i­cally brief album ver­sion was pre­ceded by an edited ver­sion released ahead of the album as a 7″ sin­gle in 1970, in a pic­ture sleeve designed by Peter Sin­field and pho­tographed by Will Christie. The design is atyp­i­cal for King Crim­son in a num­ber of ways, most par­tic­u­larly for incor­po­rat­ing pho­tog­ra­phy (oth­er­wise seen only on Red, THRAK, and The Con­struKc­tion of Light) as opposed to paint­ing or illus­tra­tion, and the use of a styl­ized type­face that has not dated well. The lyrics were printed on the back of the sleeve.

Jon Green’s mys­ti­cal analy­sis of the lyrics of Peter Sin­field for In the Wake of Posei­don. A must-read for any­one inter­ested in the mythol­ogy (the gods Posei­don, Mars, etc.) and mys­ti­cism inher­ent in the lyrics, art, and even the con­struc­tion and sequenc­ing of the music itself.

Thanks to com­menter Rick Roys­ton for notic­ing the vis­i­ble seams on Tammo de Jongh’s “12 Arche­types”, and unearthing info about Richard Gardner’s book The Pur­pose of Love, the first appear­ance of de Jongh’s “The 12 Faces of Humankind”.

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

One thought on “King Crimson Album Art: In the Wake of Poseidon”

A quick response in ref­er­ence to your com­ment that the Posei­don cover “was appar­ently painted a few years prior — if that’s true, I’m curi­ous if the paint­ing was cropped or revised in any way to fit the gate­fold LP format).”

I’d always been puz­zled by the barely dis­cernible rec­tan­gu­lar frames around each of the char­ac­ters on the cover. It seemed a bit, er, sub­stan­dard. I’d assumed that each of the orig­i­nal pic­tures had had a frame around it, and that these had been crudely elim­i­nated when pro­duc­ing the cover.

Nearly right. Years later (!) in 1977, I came across a copy of ‘The Pur­pose of Love’ (or pos­si­bly ‘The Magic Cir­cle’) with Tammo De Jongh’s orig­i­nal pic­tures of the 12 Arche­types. The pic­tures were of the heads alone, each being signed and dated ‘1967’. (Some of the images are athttp://www.happyhackerbbs.com/index.php?topic=3069.msg26546#msg26546)

Which led (and still leads) me to believe that Tammo de Jongh (or pos­si­bly Sin­field?) laid out the orig­i­nal pic­tures to fit the gate­fold sleeve, tweak­ing them to erase the sig­na­tures and dates, and fill­ing in the back­ground appro­pri­ately to cre­ate a sin­gle image. The residue of the rec­tan­gu­lar frames is the one anom­aly, and one won­ders whether the frames were taken out at the last minute by mod­i­fy­ing the print­ing plate. They cer­tainly look that way.

Finally, a word of thanks. I’ve only just found your Crimso posts and am enjoy­ing them a lot. Thank you!